Discover Top Posts Tagged with #cecil cunningham

Girls' School (1938) John Brahm

January 17th 2026

#girls' school #1938 #john brahm #anne shirley #nan grey #dorothy moore #gloria holden #cecil cunningham #pierre watkin #the romantic age

Have you seen The Awful Truth (1937)?

Yes

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Voting ended onMar 14, 2025

#polls #movies #the awful truth #the awful truth 1937 #the awful truth movie #30s movies #old hollywood #leo mccarey #irene dunne #cary grant #ralph bellamy #alexander d’arcy #cecil cunningham #have you seen this movie poll

Above Suspicion

Joan Crawford bought out her MGM contract after making Richard Thorpe’s ABOVE SUSPICION (1943, TCM). Was it the crazy plot? The misguided genre mash-up? The horrible disguise that makes her look ridiculous and her own age? Unlike the stinker she made before this, REUNION IN FRANCE (1942), it only occasionally rises to the heights of camp. Instead, you may be tempted to cringe at the comedy and laugh when it gets serious.

On his wedding day in 1939, an Oxford professor (Fred MacMurray) is approached by a friend in the British Foreign Office about using his honeymoon to do a little spying on the Third Reich. His bride (Crawford) thinks it will all be a lark, so they trade quips as they travel to Paris, Salzburg and the Tyrol. Along the way, there’s a brief appearance by an Austrian lesbian with no relation to the plot, musical clues, a floral password and an assassination during a performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (everyone’s a critic). Then things get serious, and they have to don unflattering disguises to get to freedom.

I think the main reason this plate of hooey isn’t as much fun as REUNION IN FRANCE is that it’s directed by Thorpe, who could be a plodding company man, rather than Jules Dassin, who even that early in his career had a sense of style and understood pace. The film is based on a novel by Helen MacInnes, who was inspired by her own German honeymoon, which didn’t involve spying but did give her a sense of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Though it was made during the war, when the Production Code was no longer toadying to the German consulate, there isn’t much sense of atrocity in this film. There’s a great deal of paranoia, but the worst we see the Nazis do is an attempt to torture Crawford, seemingly by mussing her hair and smearing dirt on her cheeks.

Crawford and MacMurray try to make this work, but the script defeats them. It doesn’t give them very good comic lines, so the screwball scenes fall flat. And the plot is ludicrous from the get-go. The thought of trusting a high-stakes intelligence issue to someone who thinks it will be fun makes one wonder if the foreign service was filled with Trump appointees. On the plus side, Basil Rathbone, Cecil Cunningham and, best of all, Conrad Veidt turn up. In his last film, Veidt is cast as a resistance member struggling to make a living as a tour guide and, in one scene, a gigolo. Watching him tango with a hefty blonde is a joy and demonstrates that he didn’t always have to play sneering villains. I’d rather have seen a film all about him. As a diversion, Crawford and MacMurray get to do their own singing. He’s quite good, and their duet on “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” is charming. Pity they didn’t get to do an encore in a better picture.

#thrillers #richard thorpe #joan crawford #fred macmurray #basil rathbone #cecil cunningham #conrad veidt

Janet Beecher, Cecil Cunningham, Marjorie Rambeau and Hedda Hopper for Albert Rogell’s LAUGH IT OFF (1939).

#janet beecher #cecil cunningham #marjorie rambeau #hedda hopper #classic movies

Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) and her Aunt Patsy (Cecil Cunningham) are trying to have a nice visit with their next door neighbor Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy) in this scene from the 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth from Columbia Pictures. Lucy’s soon to be ex-husband has dropped by to visit the dog, but their musical duet at the piano makes so much noise that Lucy can’t hear what Dan is saying. When the song ends and the two of them start wrestling on the floor, Lucy, in frustration, throws a newspaper at them.

#gif #The Awful Truth #Irene Dunne #Ralph Bellamy #Cecil Cunningham #Columbia Pictures #1937 movies